Oh, wine. What are we going to do with you?
When compared to your beer and spirits brethren, you’re a marketing version of the Steve Buscemi meme: working so studiously to appeal to the youths, yet somehow coming across like that awkward dad trying too hard to look cool.
Recent stabs at trendy relevance have included NTFs, “clean wine,” the non-alcoholic bandwagon, and Barefoot’s wine-based entry into the hard seltzer game. While a few of those have found niche utility in the super-luxury wine ecosystem — like NFTs for high-end collector provenance tracking, and pricey non-alcoholic bubbly for pretentious posing in the club — none have moved the greater wine market forward in any meaningful way.
So why is it so frustratingly elusive for this branch of the booze triumvirate to develop a winning message for the younger masses? And what have been the hits and misses?
Wine’s Inherent and Self-Inflicted Shortcomings
The fundamental nature of wine puts it at a profound disadvantage when juxtaposed against spirits and beer. The process to produce this noble elder of the alcohol trio is just downright cumbersome.
“I mean, you kind of have to think about what makes wine such a different product. Wine is an agricultural product,” says Chris Cottrell of California’s venerated Bedrock Wine Co. and Under the Wire. As partner and consigliere with Morgan Twain-Peterson at the heritage winemaking operation, he describes the poetry of the process as both its greatest asset and worst enemy. “It’s not made in a
